Anniversaries and New Beginnings

Abby and Tim break down the first Day-Ahead clear of CAISO’s EDAM program, the first anniversary of the launch of IESO’s nodal market, Conastone 500kV XF congestion in PJM, and MISO summer capacity prices. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to Status Check, Grid Statuses podcast, taking a look at the wild world of North American power markets. This is Tim Ennis joined by Abby Listina. Abby, it is the first day of EDAM. How how does it feel to be you know living living through a historic event like this?

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Yeah, happy first day of EDAM. It's exciting. It's kind of it's funny because it feels like RTOS just launched yesterday. I mean, it was a month ago on April 1st. So there we have these back-to-back historic events, which, you know, reduces the sparkle a little bit. It's like, didn't I just live through this? But no, it's so exciting um to see EDAM get launched um this year. And um, yeah, May will be a fun month for me just because I'll get to um yeah, explore this new market that Kais is putting out there.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Yeah, absolutely. It's uh yeah, it's not doesn't feel like every day, but it it kind of has felt that way that uh that we get some major market uh movements out west. I guess yeah, what have you been seeing, you know, with EDAM, anything, anything coming in so far and sort of just general, what have you been seeing out west this week?

SPEAKER_01 1:09

Yeah, you know, the EDAM um day ahead got delayed yesterday afternoon. Um kind of expected, you know, ironing out some hiccups. So we had a couple hour delay and um, you know, saw the first day ahead prices for Pacific Corps kind of come through. And, you know, we're watching real-time prices um this morning and you know, saw some volatility, which again to be expected with the new market. So no big surprises um yet. So yeah, just really um excited to explore the data um for the day ahead, you know, see how trends work out. Uh Pacificore isn't super renewable heavy, but you know, wind does play a factor in pricing. And so does solar. We see that midday solar trough in both pace west and pace east. So uh we saw it in the day ahead clear today, for example. Tomorrow it should be cloudy and pace west. So we'll probably see a little bit less solar, a little bit less solar trough. Again, you know, uh we don't have a lot of data to work off of. Um, a little bit, but um, just seeing how, you know, with the market rules and the regulations and how they're doing the clear, um, how prices kind of will iron out. I was a little um, I thought prices were gonna verify just a teensy bit higher today in the day ahead. Uh they have they verified a little bit lower than what I fundamentally thought, which was interesting, but again, I didn't have too much to base it off of. Um, so yeah, just so exciting to uh be looking into the new data. Um but you know, outside of EDAM, KAISO has had an interesting April. You know, I ran some analysis and saw just, you know, a huge change in imports. You know, imports, uh, you know, we saw for the prior three years, 2023, 2024, 2025, we saw, you know, in the midday, we saw net exports actually from Kaiso. Kaiso was exporting their excess solar. Um, and then this year um in April, we did not see that trend verify. Uh, we actually saw um imports continue through the midday, um, kind of like flatlined, um, and we saw a pretty big increase in imports because of that shift from exports to imports in that midday. We also saw solar decrease in the midday, which is surprising. You know, Kaiso still has a plethora of solar curtailments that are happening in the midday, just more solar than um transmission lines can handle, than the grid, you know, needs. Um, so we see that's those solar curtailments basically every day in the spring. And we actually saw solar decrease, which was interesting. Um, but battery charging did increase, actually, to the same amount solar did. Still got to look into that a bit, just because not the not the trends you would expect and not the pattern that we would expect in Kaiso. So really interesting month for Kaiso, April. Um, and as we go into you know, May, we're gonna have even more interesting things to look at um now that we have Pacific Horror kind of folding into the scene um with EDAM. And we have a lot of eyes watching EDAM in the West just because there is this great, you know, divide of SPP Markets Plus, which is their day ahead market that they're gonna launch next year, and EDAM, you know, run by Kaiso. So we have BAs, you know, there's a wealth of BAs in the West that are, you know, picking sides, and it's not necessarily driven by geographics, it's driven by policy and who's running the grids and how trading friendly they are and things like that. So there's a lot of eyes on EDAM because you know, there's a lot of people that are still on the fence and trying to see how California is kind of gonna manage this. Will they manage this? You know, will the government still remain um in control of KAISO, you know, with AB 825? That might dissipate um and KISO might be able to um break free of the um, you know, overarching governance of the California government and that could influence BAs on their decisions as well. So lots of eyes on the market, lots of eyes on California and the West. Um, again, yeah, just monumental uh things that are happening that is just so exciting to be on the front lines of and reporting to you guys here. Um, you know, but outside of the West, you know, MISO had their capacity results released for the uh this next calendar year and specifically this summer. So this summer capacity pricing, you know, extremely expensive in MISO. However, we did see a decrease year over year. So even though we're seeing, you know, $424 for the northern uh zones, you know, we um saw a decrease year over year, which was um kind of exciting to see. And that's mainly driven, there's a new natural gas plant added into MISO's summer capacity and then solar. So MISO's been sneakily adding um a lot of solar, and um that has helped uh their summer capacity pricing. But myso is still at risk this summer, you know, when wind is flat and if we do have a cloudier day and higher load, we we could see um some, you know, tight market conditions and high real-time prices verify. Um, you know, the fundamentals in summer are, you know, different than what we saw this winter, especially during winter storm firm. There was no sun, no wind, and we saw some pretty tight grid conditions in Myso. But, you know, load will be higher in the summer. It's a summer peaking uh load region. Um, you know, it's more likely that when we have those high loads, that the sun will be out to kind of help in the midday, but that still strains the evening peak if wind is flat. So again, high temperatures can kind of bring flat wind, you know, given those pressure changes in the atmosphere. So the evening peak still will be strained. Myso added battery storage to their fuel mix this year, which was cool to see added, but uh they're still pretty weak on the battery build-outs compared to, you know, Kaiso and ERCOT, who have again also those big solar penetrations in the midday, and then batteries to help out that like transition when solar falls off, the sun sets and load um spikes. So we'll be watching that, of course. It'll be interesting to see. Um, and yeah, it's just fun to watch myso such a big um and impressive uh grid uh you know, kind of add some of that renewable capacity, see some of that capacity pricing go down, but we'll still see those tight grid conditions um due to you know just the tightness of the dispatchable generation. So yeah, exciting, exciting period in the West, but you know, the West isn't the only market that's had some exciting um changes, but also I think you're looking at an anniversary, Tim, for a new market out east. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_00 8:01

Yeah, yeah. Anniversary is uh yeah, kind of a great way to put it. So we are officially today one year out from the market renewal program up in IESO. So in the Canadian province of Ontario, Canada's largest uh province by population, uh, home to you know many uh uh you know great great portions of uh of that great country and uh and Drake. So uh definitely uh depending on on uh if you're a fan or not. But yeah, it's been one year out since the MRP program commenced. So again, before May 1st of 2025, Ontario was uh not a nodal market, uh, was basically defined by a single energy price across uh the system known as a HOEP, uh hourly Ontario energy price. And then you just had that kind of results resolve into a lot of you know inefficiencies within the market. So last year they transitioned to a um uh a shift uh to uh uh nodal pricing, so pricing uh uh each generator, but then also uh introducing congestion pricing, virtual trading, uh, and it's been sort of uh an interesting market to watch. You know, there are a lot of people who I think initially thought that the market was going to be pretty dead. It's a very nuke-driven market. Uh so we've been seeing uh a fair bit of volatility there. So kind of went through some of the changes we've been seeing across the market, some of the trends, uh, and yeah, kind of celebrating uh the one-year anniversary there. And you know, excited to kind of keep iterating on that a little bit, but also you know, kind of package that up into uh into a blog, hopefully sometime next week for everybody. So a little sneak peek there. I think kind of continuing on uh on a little bit of market change, uh, but also talking still about uh Canada. Uh so Champlain, Hudson Power Express and NISO. So uh as you might have seen also in another one of the grid status blogs, there are two new tie lines being built from Hudric, Quebec down into the Northeast. So you had the New England Clean Energy Connect tie into Maine. So that's flowing power from Quebec into Maine, uh, with a PPA uh by uh for for ratepayers here in Massachusetts. Uh that's a 1250 megawatt uh line, or pardon me, 1200. And then you have Champagne Power uh Champlain Hudson Power Express, uh, which is again another DC tie line. This one uh for New York. So this is actually tying into Astoria, uh kind of northern Queens, also flow and power uh from Quebec. So definitely uh an interesting tie line there. Uh a lot of implications for zone J and K specifically in the summer. But this line uh is already uh completed construction. Now they're in the testing phase. So we had initial flows start off this week. Again, basically on Monday and Tuesday, we're talking 25 megawatts. Over the week, we've seen that line continue to ramp up. Uh, they're at almost about 1200 megawatts today. Uh so definitely something to kind of keep an eye out for there with flows on that line picking up. Again, do we start to see some uh price changes in the in the midday as that's flowing in the real time, but also just a lot of implications there for the summer. I think kind of speaking of almost summers, we did have you know near summer-like conditions in in Urcot at the end of last week and then even uh on Monday. So basically had a large price spike over the evening peak, kind of concentrated over that net load peak on Monday. You had $500 megawatt hour clears over the evening peak, and sort of as you know, as we kind of expected, you had a lot of battery hurting kind of over that net load peak. So basically, you know, as as you'd expect, batteries, you know, kind of honed in on that net load peak discharge. They helped to keep prices under control to some degree. Again, you still had had some volatility, but the the largest spikes were kind of over that uh the hour after the battery uh peak. So sort of again, you do have a little bit of almost game theory going on with battery operators. Uh pretty much everybody's gonna go for the net load peak and you know, get the get the highest clears there, but is it worth kind of being a little bit of a contrarian every now and then, kind of soak up maybe some of that real-time volatility that, you know, after after these units with you know limited storage capacity have kind of uh you know completed uh their cycles, that yeah, is that where uh energy prices start to go? And again, kind of something to keep in mind is summer. It's uh, you know, even though the sun goes down, uh net load peak starts to tail off, it's still wicked odd. I mean, we're talking temp still kind of up into the upper 80s, very humid, had a lot of gulf uh moisture coming in off the gulf. So no, it was a fairly strong uh Monday morning. And I think, you know, again, a little bit of a taste of summer uh there. And again, some of those summer operations starting to come in. Um and again, kind of kind of speaking of some volatility, uh did have the return of a lot of connoisseur transformer congestion volatility in PJM at the start of the week. So did have an emergency outage on the Conison number four transformer, uh, drive congestion on the parallel transformer. Uh yeah, this was an emergency outage that was submitted on looked like Sunday night, went out on Monday, drove a ton of volatility in PJM, and particularly even on Tuesday as well. Uh so what we you know we had on Tuesday was cloud coverage overperformed forecasts, had a lot of uh energy price volatility as well, but a load overperformed on the sink of that constraint. You had a weaker solar output, and you had a lot of volatility there in the morning. You got $500 price spikes were basically uh you know common throughout the hours. Then you had cloud coverage kind of dissipate in the south. So you lost it over performance, you lost the congestion, you gained some solar. And then one of the big things we've been seeing too is PJM has been a net importer for a lot of this week. You know, generation outages is still pretty high. Uh, and you've seen PJAM uh, you know, import from, you know, kind of the usual suspects, TVA, North Carolina, uh, Duke. But then you even had some intervals earlier this week where P Jam was importing from NISO. So uh definitely uh, you know, points to uh to a grid uh under a bit of stress. That connoisseur transformer outage ended up coming back to service early over the afternoon on Tuesday. So that paired with you know just generally kind of milder leak uh was enough to kind of kill some of that volatility. Uh, you know, was kind of anticipating some volatility on Wednesday, but again, that strength of those imports really helped to quell some of the energy price volatility, and as did you know, just some of the volatility we saw over the morning, uh, the prior day. Again, you tend to see it where if you have a very volatile morning uh beyond expectations that happens before day ahead submissions close, dayhead usually does a better job of kind of capturing that. So uh definitely was uh was noticed there on uh on Wednesday. And then the one other thing I think we'll kind of hit on this week is you know, April's over. And so that did allow us to kind of take a look at Dominion load trends. So Dominion, home to data center alley, has seen the largest amount of load growth in PJM. And we can continue to see that uh particularly over the off-peak uh this this month. So off-peak is when you kind of have the weakest level of environmental-driven load. So if it's cloudy, that doesn't really matter. There's no solar, there's no lighting load, uh temperatures are usually the most mild, so you're not gonna have cooling load influence come in very strong in the springtime at least, uh, over the off-peak and kind of similar. It's not cold enough to drive much of a heating load response. Uh, we had about 1,500 megawatts of uh off-peak load growth uh year over year. Again, some of that is gonna be environmental, that there were some days with cooling load that can skew that, but that does point to, again, a lot of additional large load coming online within the past year uh in uh Virginia. You've had a lot of uh transmission upgrades, particularly up in Data Center Alley. That, you know, even on stakeholder calls, PJM was expecting to see a pretty disproportionate jump uh at the end of last year and into this year, due in part to just some of those projects being energized. So you had a lot of uh large loads that were basically ready to just flip the switch and interconnect at that point. And those upgrades allowed for that. So definitely something to kind of keep an eye out for uh in Dominion uh heading into summer. Again, PGM is summer peaking. Uh so definitely uh we'll be keeping an eye out on that. Uh Happy, anything else you're kind of keeping an eye out for uh this week or you know, anything uh kind of on the agenda for next week?

SPEAKER_01 16:44

Yeah, um back to EDAM. Yeah, I'll just be watching EDM. You know, it's funny that it's launching on a Friday, so I'll probably be watching this weekend to see how, you know, these first couple days kind of shake out. Um, and then, you know, you made a great point. Like we're entering into summer and Kaiso is a summer peaking grid, so it'll just be um interesting to watch. Um, you know, how you know Kaiso's summer readiness um gets posted and what it looks like. Um, you know, I wonder if they'll talk about Zanzia. You know, there hasn't been any official announcements outside of us kind of breaking the news. And so I wonder if they're factoring that in because that will be interesting to see how um that added wind capacity um can help support Kaiso this summer. You know, we have to watch out for hydro this summer. Uh, the West has seen, you know, record low snowpacks across the West, Pacific Northwest, Rocky Mountain region. Um, but Kaiso's um reservoir levels are pretty full right now. So it's kind of surprising. We had record low snowpack kind of in the city area of Nevadas, but we do have these really full reservoir levels um heading into summer. So it'll just be interesting to see how hydro can kind of play out, if Sunzia can help support, you know, maybe that loss of hydro that we'll see later in the season when we normally see, you know, refilling these reservoirs from snowpack, you know, you know, later in in the middle of summer and things like that, as, you know, the runoff kind of filters and fills in those. So we'll see how hydro plays out. I'm, you know, more bullish based on hydro. I think hydro reservoir levels will decrease um and will be kind of strained at the end of summer, beginning of fall, um, when grid conditions can really get tight and tes. So uh, as we've seen, yeah, like a late summer bloom in September and October, but we have a good bit of time before we get there. Um, so yeah, just exploring these new markets um and just a lot to dive in there. So um uh so other than that, yeah, nothing on my docket uh for this next week.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

Yeah, no, it's uh definitely, you know, nice to enter the uh first full week of EDAM with uh, you know, maybe a little bit less on the agenda, allow for uh some further analysis there. Uh but yeah, I'm excited to kind of see how that continues to shape out as well. I think, you know, kind of on the east coast, but you know, again, kind of similar, but nothing too crazy uh expected again. You know, kind of it feels like what we always say, famous last words there. So we are expected to see, you know, May start off, particularly across the east coast, on a relatively mild but unsettled pattern. Um so you know, we have a lot of you know high temperatures uh across the east coast, you know, kind of stuck in the 50s for for much of the the start of the month there. And then we are gonna see a fair bit of precipitation. So again, definitely gonna be something to kind of keep in mind for these markets, is just these flatter load curves. So again, kind of gonna keep an eye on how the RTOs uh, you know, specifically PJM, uh, but even up and down the East Coast kind of continue to account for that. Again, we tend to see markets struggle on some of these uh cold front days where you have precipitation uh and a lot of cloud coverage there. Um, but outside of that, keeping an eye out on just how the CHPE continues to come on uh as it's testing, do we start to see any price impacts uh in the market again as that uh tie line is ramping up? Kind of continuing uh on maybe some just outages in general. We do have some outages scheduled on the Elmont 500 KV network down in uh Virginia. So this kind of north, kind of straight shot, kind of almost northwest of Richmond. Uh it's uh Cunningham to Elmont and Elmont Transformer scheduled to go out. One thing I'm kind of keeping an eye out for there again is just a little bit of that bearish Dominion hub congestion, particularly uh some risk for Ladysmith uh circuit breaker. Definitely kind of keeping an eye out on that. Um, this one's kind of interesting because it's so bearish to the hub, but also the Dominion zone itself. It's kind of just power struggling to flow into data center alley. Uh that you can actually get solar curtailments from this. So we've seen it's almost a uh you know, seesaw effect almost, uh, where you'd have some solar curtailments and you have some price volatility due to just the energy price impact, but also congestion, and then uh you'd have some ladiesmith circuit breaker, and it would just bounce back and forth almost. So keeping an eye out on that. And I think the other thing is just gonna be keeping an eye out on those nukes up here in ISO, New England. Again, Seabrook went out at the beginning of April. We're about almost coming up on a month uh with that unit offline. So kind of keeping an eye out on Seabrook, as again, it's not like it's gonna be this week, but you know, we're getting into May, kind of getting into the start of summer. Uh, you know, gonna kind of start to need some uh that baseload generation coming on uh back online. Uh but then also for New England, uh, you know, this spring had largely been defined by extreme periods of negative energy pricing. So with Seabrook coming online, with that gas burn starting to starting to fade, do we start to see the return of? of some negative pricing up here in New England, uh just with that baseload coming online on some of these sunny, mild days that uh yeah, we we had such uh such low pricing. But definitely uh you know been a busy week, kind of expecting to see that continue next week with uh a lot more on EDAM. Anything else uh you know catching your eye, Abby, or just uh you know excited to keep an eye on the market and see how things are play uh playing out and shaping out out west?

SPEAKER_01 22:27

Yeah, I guess like one thing is, you know, uh the HVDC tie lines between SPP West and you know SPP Maine um have been on extreme outage this past week especially um kind of um unexpected and unplanned um and you know miles city should return to full capacity um within the next week so I'll be watching that to see how that kind of affects um maybe real-time price spikes that we see in SPP West maybe some of that congestion we see you know in North Dakota so that miles city tie line I'll be watching also this week but yeah outside of that um you know watching load increase as uh we get into late spring.

SPEAKER_00 23:10

Well at least for some of us it's uh still pretty cold up here in Boston but yeah be complaining about the heat eventually but yeah it's uh been a busy week and excited for more out west but I think that uh that wraps up this episode. Uh thanks for joining everybody. Excited for a little bit more out west and we'll talk to you again next week.

SPEAKER_01 23:29

Bye everyone